Over the past several years, people have become more interested in maintaining good physical health by deliberately engaging in exercise and other physical activities. Weightlifting is but one of the many types of exercise that people choose in order to maintain fitness. Swimming, running, rowing, aerobic activity, as well as other forms of exercise are also used in order to maintain physical fitness and to provide some aerobic challenge to a person's physiological system so that they may maintain better health. The link between physical activity and physical health is well recognized.
Weightlifting is often a preferred form of physical activity, because particular muscle groups, which may have importance for specific sports or the like, can be targeted and developed. Consequently, through weightlifting, an individual can focus actively on the biceps, triceps, calves, thighs, gluteals, abdominals, etc. In so doing, the individual may not only engage in an aerobic activity, but also engage in an activity that specifically strengthens a chosen muscle or group of muscles.
A significant number of exercise machines are available which allow the individual to target particular muscles of the upper body, including the pectorals, the biceps, the triceps, the shoulders, the latissimus dorsi, and other back muscles. Combination machines also exist in the current art which allow for the individual to exercise more than one muscle group. Nevertheless, such combination machines are very limited in their scope of exercises available to any individual, especially upper body exercises. Such machines entail manual adjustments for varying the resistance (manually handling the weights).
Thus, a need is seen to exist for an exercise machine that allows for a wide variety of upper body exercises to be accomplished by the individual without the need to attach or remove parts from the machine and which provides user-friendly adjustable resistance for a plurality of upper body muscle group exercises.